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Transsexual Seeks to Join San Francisco Police
By Reuters
Contributed by Elizabeth Parker and Bobbie G
San Francisco
March 27, 1998
A former virile National Guardsman is fighting San Francisco's City Hall for
the right to join the police force -- as a woman.
"Cristiana Rivas has wanted to be a San Francisco police officer ever since
she was a little boy," the San Francisco Examiner said Friday.
Rivas, 39, who underwent a sex-change operation last year, was crushed in
January when she learned that her application to join the force had been
turned down for psychological reasons.
"I don't have any disorders," Rivas, now a tall, slender woman with high
cheekbones, told the newspaper.
After passing the police department's written, oral, and physical exams as
well as a lie detector test, Rivas thought she was closing in on her dream of
joining San Francisco's finest.
But the police turned her down, saying she failed the psychological part of
the application.
Now Rivas, who as Christopher served eight years with the National Guard and
earned a bachelor's degree in international relations and military affairs, is
appealing the decision to the city's Department of Human Resources, saying she
was the victim of a process that doesn't understand transsexualism.
San Francisco police spokesman Sherman Ackerson denied Rivas's claim, pointing
out that the force already includes one transsexual -- a sergeant who started
out as a woman and became a man.
"Our policy has always been that we do not discriminate against people because
of sex orientation, and we are accepting of people who are transgender,"
Ackerson said.
"This person was precluded from department not because of transgender issue,
but apparently because of some other criterion."
Rivas, who quit her job as a clerk at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms in expectation of a job with the police, spent $1,000 for her own
psychiatric evaluation and came away judged "emotionally fit and stable."
The department was unbending, however, forcing human resources officials to
schedule a final psychiatric review on April 6 to determine if she was
discriminated against.
Rivas told the Examiner she might take legal action against the police if her
psychiatric appeal fails. "I want to believe that the department is not
pregnant with the old ways, because I give people the benefit of the doubt,"
Rivas said.
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